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Okay, introducing Iona Craig from The Intercept.
She's got this very important article, Women and Children in Yemeni Village Recall Horror of Trump's Highly Successful Seal Raid.
I think everybody could hear my ironic quotes in the way I read that, right?
Welcome back to the show, Iona.
How are you?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me.
Really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Very good work.
I think no one expected for any Western reporter to run right in there and tell this story the way you did and so quickly.
So thoroughly.
So congratulations to you as far as just the quality of the work here.
And thank you for doing it, because I think we all needed to know.
Thanks.
I just happened to be in Yemen at the time.
It was by coincidence.
I was there on a reporting trip anyway, and I was actually due to leave three days before I left.
I was due to leave.
The raid happened.
And then, of course, you know, the way it was being spun back in the U.S. by the White House and the Pentagon and then hearing myself what was going on on the ground quite clearly didn't connect.
And it was it was a little bit of a red rag to a bull, really, for me, because I was obviously hearing what was coming out of the White House and the reality, even from some distance away on the ground, was quite clearly very different from what was being spun by government officials in in Washington.
All right.
Now, well, I guess, first of all, can you sort of give us the thumbnail and take us back to the night of January the 29th and and overall and we can get into all the details on follow up and everything, but give us kind of an overall picture of the raid.
And then I think maybe we'll debunk a couple of the White House narratives and and, you know, as opposed to their spin, and then we'll get back to the real details of what happened to the people there.
That's all.
Sure, sure.
Sure.
So this happened on the 29th of January in a very remote location in the province of Al-Baitha in Yemen, in a group of villages called Yaqla.
And it was chosen, the night was chosen as a deliberately moonless night, so it was pitch black.
But what's most crucial about this place, actually, is the fact that it's right near the front lines of Yemen civil war at the moment.
And those people in that village were actually technically on paper, at least on the same side as the U.S. in the civil war that's going on in Yemen at the moment.
So when these soldiers came in in the middle of the night storming the village, the people there thought it was their rivals, the Houthis, who they've been fighting for since 2014 anyway.
So every man with a weapon, which is every man in that village in Yemen and most of Yemen at the moment, grabbed their guns and went to defend the village, not knowing that they were taking on Americans initially.
And because of that, the Navy SEALs got pinned down quite quickly.
And the Navy SEAL who was actually killed was shot very soon into that gunfight.
And the village itself is kind of spread up a hillside on the edge of a mountain, and the Navy SEALs were coming in at a disadvantage anyway.
They were coming in from the low ground, because it appeared they were targeting two groups of houses, two buildings at the lower end of the village, slightly separate from the rest of it, where the rest of the civilian population lived.
And certainly one of those villages, when I went there, was being used as like a guest house for low level al-Qaeda militants who were then seemingly going backwards and forwards from that location to fight in the civil war in Yemen at the moment.
But when the SEALs then got pinned down, they called in for air support.
And it was that air support that did a huge amount of damage.
They bombed a house with women and children in, and then as women and children were running from that air support, I spoke to like a five-year-old boy who described running from the helicopter gunship fire, which strafed the entire village.
And his mother was gunned down next to him as he ran.
And she was holding his 18-month-old younger brother, who miraculously survived and was found in the dawn light the next morning, still in his dead mother's arms.
So yes, it was a highly precarious undertaking in the first place, in the circumstances of the civil war.
I mean, it was clearly quite madness and suicidal, if anything, to be going in under those circumstances.
But yeah, obviously the reaction coming out of the White House and from Trump was this was a highly successful raid.
And clearly from the numbers who were killed and civilians, you're talking about 10 children and young children who were killed in that raid, and then at least another six women on top of that.
And then there were follow-up airstrikes a month later that killed more children.
And yes, the village is now totally abandoned because of what's happened.
And they also wiped out their entire livestock of some 120 animals in the process of all of that.
Okay, well, so please tell us more about this secondary airstrike, because I guess I've heard of some different attacks, but I never heard specifically that this was a follow-up in the same village.
Even sort of a delayed double tap, it sounds like.
How do you mean later on?
I mean, in the same night, what happened?
No, I mean, didn't you just say a month later, they bombed the same village again, and that was when people finally gave up and left?
Yeah, exactly.
Can you elaborate on that a little bit more?
Because I hadn't even heard that one at all.
Yeah.
So the beginning of March, from March 2nd to March 4th, suddenly there was this just massive wave of airstrikes.
They crossed three provinces in Yemen, and one of them was the same province where this where this village was.
And in the space of 36 hours, America carried out more airstrikes in that time than they had done in the whole of 2016.
So that gives you a kind of idea.
We're talking about more than 30 airstrikes that then went up to more than 40 airstrikes by the following day.
And included this village again.
Exactly.
But they didn't just drone it.
They were going after appeared to be going after a tribal sheik who was actually there when I went and visited the village, whose brothers had been killed in the raid, and who more of his brothers had previously been killed in drone strikes.
They appeared to be going after him, but in the process of trying to do that, killed two children and another three adults, some of whom I'd actually met when I was in the village.
And they, again, not only carried out drone strikes, but strafed the village again.
So I spoke to the sheik who hosted me in his house, who was one of the few families that had stayed on after the raid.
And he said for three nights in a row, the village was bombed, strafed by helicopter gunship fire.
And they were pretty much under constant attack for three and then eventually then four nights.
And he left.
He left and he was then living under trees with his family, with children and women.
And the village had to be abandoned.
They had nowhere else to go.
And they actually saw it as as revenge, actually, you know, that the Americans had come back because they'd lost a Navy SEAL in that raid.
And from that perspective, they saw it as a as an action of vengeance against them to wipe them all out because of because of the death of a Navy SEAL.
Even if that isn't the case, that's you know, that is now the very sad perspective of Yemenis in that area that they have of the United States government.
Sounds plausible, too.
Now, well, yeah, I mean, there is a history of kind of slightly mad, you know, appearingly madness attacks being carried out in that in that kind of mentality after after U.S. troops have been killed.
So, yes, it wouldn't be a first.
All right.
Now, if I read this thing right, you sound very confident that these men, yes, are anti-Houthi fighters on the American and Saudi side of the civil war there and that they're not Al-Qaeda guys.
You're saying one Al-Qaeda guy lived up on the hill or some kind of thing, but that the the subjects of the attack were just the local tribal people who had no affiliation with AQAP?
The complication was with Al-Qaeda was this one particular house that was owned by one of the men in the village, but was being seemingly used as a guest house.
So we're talking about guys wandering in and out, you know, living there temporarily, using it as a as as a accommodation, really, to then go and fight on the front lines.
And according to Al-Qaeda's own list of names that they put out, there were eight guys who were listed with aliases, which is a common way that that Al-Qaeda uses to disguise themselves, really.
And certainly the people I spoke to in the village, they gave me a list of 26 names that didn't include those eight then that that Al-Qaeda had given.
And they one man said to me, he said, listen, these men were in there, but we avoided them.
We knew them as being aggressive and we didn't want to have anything to do with them.
And this was next door to another house of senior tribal sheikh.
And they were holding a gathering at the moment the raid happened.
Now, that senior tribal sheikh was being paid by the Saudi led coalition who are on the same sides as the US.
The US is supporting the Saudi led coalition, the civil war in Yemen.
And he was arranging to hand out money to fighters in the area.
And there was also a discussion going on in the middle of that about a young man who'd been arrested or detained anyway by those Al-Qaeda men in that house.
And they were trying to resolve that situation.
So it was kind of like a tribal mediation, if you like, as well as arranging for money to be handed out by this very senior tribal figure who was in that house.
Now, nearly all of those men were killed, including the senior tribal figure, along with their children and along with the women that were there as well.
And so, yeah.
Well, so from the military's point of view, let me play devil's advocate here for a second.
And I must be leaving something out.
But it sort of sounds like, well, they had a, you know, assuming the premise of the American war against Al-Qaeda in Yemen at all, they had a legitimate target against these Al-Qaeda guys.
And unfortunately, this is a very Second Amendment society over there.
So when they showed up, every man in the village came out with his rifle, as Texans might.
And so too bad, you know, there was a lot of collateral damage, but our guys were pinned down by the locals.
And so the locals got shot.
And unfortunately, some of their wives did, too.
But that's what they get for accidentally coming to the defense of an Al-Qaeda cell we were targeting.
So where do I go off the story there?
Well, there's various problems with that is, firstly, the amount of civilians that were killed were more than double the amount of Al-Qaeda guys that were killed.
Secondly, I mean, my big question out of that is for what?
I mean, those eight guys were all low level local insurgents.
They're not, you know, what evidence is there that they were any threat to any Americans, never mind to America itself?
These are guys, you know, most of these guys that join up with Al-Qaeda do it for the money locally and sometimes for prestige as well.
But these were insurgents, you know, local insurgents who were fighting in the Civil War, who would have no more mind to be fighting America than than anybody else.
So, you know, what was gained out of this?
What was the point of going in there in the first place?
Now, from my own sources, the suggestion was, and that seems to have now more recently been backed up by by U.S. officials, that they were going after a guy called Qasem al-Ramey, who was the head of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who they believed was in this village.
He was clearly not in the village because he put out an audio message a few days afterwards, basically mocking the whole raid.
And the villager told me he wasn't there as well, but mocking the whole raid, mocking Trump.
And so he clearly wasn't injured or killed.
And as I mentioned in that lower end of the village where the Al-Qaeda guys were, they were all killed.
So, yes, to what end?
What are you going to gain out of this?
You know, even from either a military or political perspective, from carrying out a raid like this that has now not just alienated the entire local population around there, but has now turned locals into wanting to fighting Al-Qaeda.
You know, I met tribesmen there who they're not Al-Qaeda.
They don't want to be Al-Qaeda.
But now they really hate America right now.
And they said to me they'd happily go and fight Americans, you know.
And this is, you know, when you do cost benefits in this kind of scenario, what do you come out with?
Nothing, nothing good.
And so, therefore, this whole kind of idea that this was somehow a successful raid, that they gathered this great intelligence when the house, these low level Al-Qaeda guys were in, they never got into that house because they got pinned down by fire.
They droned it and it was blown up in an airstrike long before any U.S.
Navy SEALs could get inside to get any intelligence out of there.
So what they would have got if they did indeed get anything, I tried to pin locals down about that and said, listen, what access do they have to dead bodies or even into getting into other houses?
And they couldn't even confirm to me that the SEALs got into other houses at all.
They couldn't say one way or the other just because of the chaos of what was going on.
And it was pitch black.
They didn't have night vision goggles, you know, and it was a mess.
But yeah, any intelligence they could have got was destroyed before the Navy SEALs even got there.
So for me, you look at this whole scenario and it should have never happened in the first place.
That is what I would argue.
And, you know, the evidence that was put out by by the Pentagon of what was gained out of it, there was this video that was released saying this is Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda Arabian Peninsula video showing their bomb making skills turned out to be a 10 year old video that was widely available on the Internet and predated even the existence of AQAP, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen at all.
They didn't even exist when that video was made.
So if that was the best of what they've got or a sample of the best of what they've got, you know, it definitely doesn't justify what happened and it certainly doesn't justify the deaths of dozens of people in that village.
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Well, and it does really highlight the fact of all the ironies of America's war over there, where really, you know, these are basically could be on another day, America's shock troops against the Houthis.
And of course, the only reason the AQAP or the Houthis are a problem is because Obama for years bombed AQAP and paid Saleh to let him do it.
And then Saleh spent all that money and all the guns Obama gave him attacking the Houthis, which only made them more and more powerful every time they defeated him.
And now they're in an alliance together, Saleh and the Houthis.
And America has been basically fighting on the side of Al-Qaeda and at least their aligned fighters here in the war against them this whole time.
So as Nasser Araby, the former New York Times reporter out of Sana put it, that if they really wanted this guy al-Remy, they should have just called the Saudis and said arrest this guy or have him turn himself in or whatever.
These are our guys in this war right now.
Or arguably even Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Ali Abdullah Saleh used those weapons and some of the equipment that was given to them ended up in the hands of Al-Qaeda.
Ali Abdullah Saleh used Al-Qaeda for years.
He used them in the last civil war to fight on his behalf.
He has used them to carry out assassinations and attacks.
And the regime in Yemen did that for decades.
Then the regime split because of this civil war.
And so therefore that influence and control over Al-Qaeda split as well.
So you have the vice president now, who was the most senior commander under Ali Abdullah Saleh, has control over some parts of Al-Qaeda.
And you have Ali Abdullah Saleh still with control over parts of Al-Qaeda.
So Al-Qaeda is not detached from the state in Yemen and it is not any more detached from the state than any other fighting group, whether it be tribal militias, whether it be the Houthis or whatever.
It just so happens now because the regime is divided that it means that it ends up playing on both sides.
So, yeah, Saleh played the Americans for years, essentially to get money out of them for what they thought was for counterterrorism purposes, but for boosting his own military, which is now fighting.
He's using all of those skills and weapons to fight Saudi Arabia and essentially, therefore, to fight the Americans and to get money out of them.
And he did it really well.
All right.
Now, I know the scientists say you can't always conflate causation and correlation and all of these things because they're not the same.
And yet it sounded to me like a lot of news stories came out saying that Trump had loosened the rules of engagement for the DOD and the CIA.
And then we started hearing about more and more and more civilian casualties in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
And only just, you know, when you compare any particular two week period of time, of course, you know, Bush and Obama have been at war over there for 16 years.
Nobody's ignoring that.
But I just mean, it seemed like there's been a bit of an increase.
I wonder whether you attribute that also to a change of the rules of engagement here.
Yeah, that certainly appears to be the case.
And I think going forward, that's the most troubling aspect, really.
In the case of Yemen, it previously fell under the Obama administration.
It was categorized as an area outside of active hostilities, which basically means they were supposed to have, you know, stricter rules on engagement in those kind of areas.
There had to be a near certainty that there would not be civilian casualties.
Now, with what appears to be this change means that it puts Yemen essentially in the same category as the rest of the world.
What appears to be this change means that it puts Yemen essentially in the same category as Afghanistan or a normal war footing and means that those civilian casualties only have to be proportional.
You don't have to have a near certainty that there will not be any.
And so that means we now have increased military activity in Yemen with all of these airstrikes and operations that have been carried out.
There was another raid that was aborted at the last minute at the beginning of March as well.
The troops actually got on the ground but then left.
Along with all of those airstrikes, there's more military activity, less oversight and looser rules of engagement.
And that is only going to have dire consequences for the civilian population, whether that's in Iraq, whether that's in Somalia or whether that's in Yemen.
Yeah.
Well, Somalia, would you like to comment more on Somalia?
Have you been reporting from there at all lately?
I haven't actually.
But, you know, Somalia always fell in a similar category to Yemen on that basis because they weren't on a war footing.
It wasn't like Iraq or it wasn't like Afghanistan.
And, you know, I think what appears to be, you know, a Trump attempt to be seen to be going after al Qaeda or Islamic State or Islamist militants anyway, if he's wanting to do that, it's easier to do that with less complexities in somewhere like Yemen or Somalia than it is in Syria and Iraq, where you've got many more parties involved.
You've got the Iranians involved.
You've got the Russians involved of upsetting those other major powers, whereas America can run loose a bit more easily in somewhere like Yemen or Somalia.
So I think there are probably two areas to really watch, because if Trump is trying to be seen to be strong against al Qaeda and Islamic State, those are likely to be the two areas where it's going to play out.
Well, yeah, it's right right around 10 years since the beginning of the CIA and special forces war in Somalia there.
So nobody noticed so far.
I guess they'd have to really bomb the crap out of them to get headlines at this point.
I mean, hell, Obama starved half a million of them to death and hell, more more now.
I mean, I know it was bad weather, but the reason that the markets couldn't compensate for the bad weather is because Bush and Obama completely destroyed their country.
And so and fomented this giant war with Al-Shabaab and supported the African Union occupation of Somalia this whole time and all of that.
And nobody cared about that.
So I don't know how many Somalis I don't know why it is that their their lives are so meaningless.
Like you couldn't even if you compared 10 years of war in Somalia and the media attention from that and even compared to the media blackout on Yemen in the last year.
I bet there's more stories on Yemen in the last year than there been on Somalia this whole time.
But yeah, I mean, Trump will probably have to nuke Somalia to get a headline about killing Somalis at this point, I think.
Yeah, I mean, even last week off the coast of Yemen, there were 40 Somali refugees who were all carrying their U.N. papers with them, were killed in a boat off the coast of Yemen and by helicopter gunship fire.
Everybody's denying all knowledge, saying it wasn't me.
It certainly wasn't the Houthis or Saleh because they don't have any helicopters.
So that kind of leaves the Saudi led coalition or the U.S. because they're all in the Red Sea at the moment trying to protect that shipping route.
But yeah, they were gunned down in a boat going between Yemen and Somalia, trying to go back to Somalia because it was a better place to be than Yemen.
Having fled Somalia, obviously, now they're going back to what is now another country, you know, in famine crisis or on the edge of famine as well.
And they were gunned down in a boat last week.
And yeah, I think that that barely even even touched the sort of the small hundred words story prints in most newspapers outside of outside of Yemen.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, one last thing here before I let you go.
Can you comment on Al-Awlaki's daughter being killed there?
I think people thought, wow, that is a coincidence or that must be a bunch of Al-Qaeda guys there or I'm not sure what.
It just seems kind of odd that now the second child of Anwar Al-Awlaki, the Al-Qaeda propagandist, has been killed by the U.S.
Yeah, well, she was there because her mother was also there and her mother was the sister of a very senior tribal figure in that area in Al-Badr, whose house I mentioned was being used to carry out this tribal mediation and to hand out the salaries from the Saudi coalition.
So her uncle was a tribal sheikh and he was working for the Hadi government and the Saudi led coalition and basically running local militias to fight in the in the civil war.
Now, when he was killed during that raid, along with her, he was described by the Pentagon initially as as an Al-Qaeda militant.
The Yemeni government were quick to say that he was not.
And it was that statement was later withdrawn off from where it was posted online by the Pentagon.
But yeah, the reason she was there was because of her family relations.
So her mother was originally from Al-Badr, this area in Yemen, and she was she died.
She bled out over the space of two hours from a gunshot wound to the neck.
And the reason why that is, is because it's such a remote area that it's five hours off roads down what can be described as little more than a donkey track to the nearest hospital.
And so unless you were pretty sure you were going to survive that journey, it's not worth taking it.
And so very few did.
There are only three people that I'm aware of who took that journey in order to get to a hospital.
And so she stayed in the village and she slowly died over the space of two hours having been shot in the neck.
And she was only there because that's where her father, her uncle lived, sorry.
And and so she was in the village for that reason, along with many other children, as I say, who died that night as well.
Yeah, in the article, you say 10 children under the age of 13.
Do you know how many between the ages of 13 and 18?
Um, yeah, I mean, those would be considered military aged males.
So not if they were Americans, they wouldn't be.
I mean, the youngest was just three months old.
And then actually, there was also an unborn baby that was killed.
There was a woman who was shot in the stomach.
She was one of the few that made it out and got to the hospital.
And she had an emergency caesarean section and her baby died, although although she survived.
So, yeah, you're talking about an unborn child and a three month old being being the youngest.
I mean, the first to be killed that were teenagers was the nephew of the senior tribal sheikh who I mentioned.
He was the first one that came out and hollered at the Marines.
Who are you?
What are you doing here?
And he was shot dead and he was 12, 13 years old.
And yeah, he was the first one to die.
Yeah.
But why do they hate us, though?
It must be that wacky religion of theirs.
This is the problem.
And this is the issue, you know, with a lot of the tribesmen that I met there, you know, some of them are a bit more pragmatic and said, you know, revenge will be in God's hands.
But I've been to this area before.
I went there in 2013 when the Obama administration carried out a drone strike in the area and hit a wedding convoy and 12 civilians were killed.
And that was in exactly the same area.
And so that at that point they were they were angry, but actually their anger was directed at the Yemeni government and the new the relatively new president, Hadi, at that time because they felt the drone strikes had turned up when he was elected president, which had been in February 2012.
This time it was quite different.
The people that I spoke to, they're very angry at the Americans this time and most of them in a tribal situation when this kind of thing happens or people die in a tribal gunfight, you have mediation and compensation is offered and it's money.
This time, all of the people that I spoke to, none of them wanted compensation.
They just said we want revenge.
Some of them said that revenge will come from God, but a lot of them said we want revenge and we will fight the Americans if they come back and we are ready to fight them.
And as I say, these are not al Qaeda guys.
So this is what you create by carrying out a mission like that.
You are building your enemies, you're creating more enemies, you're not actually doing anything to solve the existing very complicated problem that that is there.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Not at all.
Good to talk to you.
You too.
All right.
So that is Iona Craig reporting for The Intercept.
Huge story here.
First hand reporting from Yemen, from the scene of the crime here.
Women and children in Yemeni village recall horror of Trump's, quote, highly successful SEAL raid.
And again, that's at the intercept dot com.
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